“Personal income tax receipts coming into the state in January fell $1.3 billion below Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s revenue estimates in the spending plan he released last month, the state controller said Tuesday… ‘Tax payments are down about $1 billion, and we don’t yet have the source of that decrease’, said Controller John Chiang, holding a news conference at the state’s tax-collection center, where 2006 tax returns have begun to trickle in. Chiang speculated that the state’s slumping housing market might be a cause of the revenue decline.”

“California next month will sell as much as $4.5 billion of debt backed by the state’s share of the 1998 legal settlement with cigarette makers in what would be the biggest offering of municipal bonds so far this year.”

“The California Department of Justice concealed tens of millions of dollars worth of contracts with lobbyists, consultants, legal firms _ even couriers and parking garages _ in violation of its own confidentiality rules, an Associated Press investigation has found. An internal agency review.. found information on scores of contracts, many of them no-bid contracts, was erroneously labeled ‘confidential’ and omitted from computerized state records, shielding the agreements from public view”

From the Los Angeles Times:

Four senior aides to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger were paid nearly a quarter-million dollars in bonuses for political work they performed during the governor’s race – money that came from insurers, oil companies, real estate developers and other private interests that contributed to the governor’s campaign. Chief of staff Susan Kennedy received a $100,000 bonus as a reward for the time she devoted to Schwarzenegger’s reelection bid, the governor’s office said Friday. With that bonus, Kennedy has collected $323,500 in campaign and taxpayer money in her year as Schwarzenegger’s top aide.

Now that big Corporations are greasing the palms of people in our Government, small business and everyday citizens no longer stand much of a chance to influence the policies of this administration. Maybe the Governor should give them another bonus for doing their normal administrative duties- or better yet, dock their pay for all the things they ignored while they were playing politics. Like for example, responding to letters written to them by ordinary citizens.

The Orange County Register has reported that Governor Schwarzenegger completely ignored the existence of a private sector database on school performance when he made the call in his state-of-the-State address for a public sector database that does exactly the same thing. Since we have not been able to learn anything about the State’s information technology plans (if any) for international business development, this report gave us pause. The state of California has an almost unbelievably bad track record in information technology projects, and some absolutely huge failures. Even though some of the same staff members were involved in some of those failures, we remained hopeful that they would consider doing things differently.